How much is free?

Any of you out there, this morning, would have handled a copy of Metro, the free newspaper, and browsed through; or listened to downloaded music on your ipod; listened to the radio at breakfast or going to work; or received a voucher or a coupon, off the train; given or been given a gift; watched a video on youtube; googled up searching something; read news on line; checked the mail on Gmail. Any of you, just this morning has for sure had experience of free.
Why free? What are the reason pushing a producer giving out things for free? Altruism? A sort of expectation of return from a wider community based on altruism? Love? Chariy? Volontay associatio? Patronage? Marketing? Are there economic reasons behing all this free? Is it really free of charge?
Quanto costa il gratis? is my bachelor thesis on this topic. Starting from this questions I tried to figure out some answers. And here they are.

Following non profit associationism, volontary work and peering, more and more business are dealing with free inside thei business models. For ideals, persuasion, awareness or obligation, these companies have to revise and change their way to do their business.
Where companies deal with information goods or knoledge goods, the production is changing looking for new ways of manifacturing these particolar goods, sharing them and collaborating through people: this is what i called peering, where producer and consumer are joined in a new figure, the prosumer. This new concept of thinking is based on altruistic, volontary and charity cause. But reputational reason are involved as well (like egoboo, the colloquial expression which means being credited publically fo he volontary work). Or phylosophycal reasons (like the one basing the open source movements and th free software foundation). Free as a speech, not as a beer means free in term of liberty, not for profit.
Promotion and marketing have brought examples and reason why of the free: using the teasing attraction of free for selling more. Patronage is considered such a particolar why of promotion, common to the branding.
Free is pushin companis to test new ways t do business or to adopt and adapt effective solution tested in other sectors.
Free for ads, free for personal or technical information: multi-sided markets are establishing the new way of business. The matter is no more to sell, but to succeed in facing potential costumers and vendors. It's a free that one of the two (or more) side has to pay. The difference is that costumers, now, is the less likely to pay for be given goods. To the costumers, most of the times, is just asked to pay attention or to use a particular service (and their payments are that they are not using other similar services). The deal free for ads and free for privacy is a good deal for most of the people out there.
Free, anyhow, sometimes is really for free, even if not for everybody. It's what i called freemium (free and premium together), the price discrimination which offers a good for free to a wide range of users in exchange of a small minority of payers (users caring more about confort and other fringe benefits).
With cross subsidies, on the other hand, it's always the final user to pay. He or she gets something for free BUT. But later on he or she has to pay for a collateral mandatory service.
So how much is free? Does exist anything for free?
The answer is "yes, but". It's all the time a compromise. Pure free is really rare, barely close to exintion (since some native population from north america had established a sort of gift economy). Most of the times we dicover other paying faces of free as I describe in the thesis. Somehow, someone has to pay.
The matter aroud free is the lack of tools to measure the value of a product given for free. And as I investigated, free doesn't always mean low quality and there is no direct connection dependance between free and quality.
How much does Linux value? How much can cost something a lot of people have had as gift and which can't be sold or buyed? No one would say nothing.
But how to estimate the value? The reality is that we are too used to know the exact price for everything.
What is useful to learn from gift economy, volontary work and open source is that in a trade at no price, who prevails is who give. Through the actiong of friendship and liberty he or she has gained his/her clients.
This is just an opportunity to monetize the gift in future investments.
The gift economy is highlighted in the thesis, even if there's the belief of it as a collateral market in a capitalistic market.
In the gift economy the real value is not by the goods or their future profits, but by the people, the clients themselves.
Money is just a tools. The power is in the agreement gained and its strategic role.
Free is cool out now, but it's risky and it has to check its whitstandibility.
Free has to face legality and to gain trust in use.
So I don't know exactly how much is free, but I succeed in highlighting some features that up now are not free and for which it worth to pay a lot.
Immediacy. Customization. Interpretation. Warranty and certification. Patronage. Findability. Luxury.

Here's the full text link: www.quantocostailgratis.it (sorry guys, it's in italian, but you can always offer me a beer via paypal clicking on "Offrimi una birra").

Cheers


d.